Karl Popper, Marx, and the Assad regime's war on its people

At the moment I am reading Karl Popper. I wasn’t expecting much relevance to our current situation but Popper’s description of Marx’s view of the state seems to explain the dogmatic rejection of any possibility of Western intervention to end the killing of civilians in Syria.

Lets concede that any intervention by outsiders is fraught with danger. Not knowing the situation, outside interventionists may produce all manner of unintended consequences. But that is simply a reason for insisting a humanitarian intervention should have strictly limited aims. It should aim to end political violence but should be entirely neutral in its dealing with local actors and be content to accept whatever politics emerges in the space that the freedom from violence creates. The interventions that we have seen over the last few years have often diverged from that ideal and I would argue that the success of such interventions falls markedly the more such interventions have tried to go beyond limited aims.

When someone criticizes an intervention it can be from two points of view. First it can be argued that the intervention was implemented in a bad way. Looking at it in that way leads to an examination of what went wrong and how interventions in future could avoid such mistakes. The alternative is to oppose intervention on principle. This is to argue that all interventions will make the situation worse no matter what the circumstances. One result of the second view is that it makes any criticism of the way an intervention is implemented pointless. For example, every thing that went wrong with the Iraq invasion arose directly from the decision of George Bush to invade. Criticism of the competence of how Bush and his administration acted becomes irrelevant because according to this view a competent implementation could not have improved the situation. By framing it that way it has the effect deflecting all criticism of Bush’s policy in Iraq beyond the invasion decision itself.
So what has this got to do with Marx? Marx’s view of the state (Chapter 17 of Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies) was that it was determined by the underlying economic conditions. The state in a capitalist society is a superstructure, an expression of the underlying capitalist nature, and hence is a bourgeois state. For a revolutionary movement this is a convenient position. It is pointless to attempt to implement reforms by means of the existing state. Nothing can be achieved until capitalism is overthrown in a socialist revolution and only then when the underlying economic structure of society has become socialist will the state cease to be a bourgeois state.

The view, that the state on the international stage is inevitably an imperialist state pursuing the naked interests of its capitalist class, is a special case of the idea of a bourgeois state. At the core of Stop the war Coalition are members of Marxist organizations and it makes sense that they should hold this view. However, the view of the state as essentially bourgeois, that is imperialist, as soon as it starts to act beyond its borders extends to many who do not in any way consider themselves Marxist. Most who use the slogan No War For Oil take it for granted that, on the domestic front, democratic governments are subject to control of their citizens but slogan essentially implies that democratic accountability fails once the same state becomes an international actor.

Why do are many progressive people seem content to let the Assad regime continue to kill its own people? Why are those same progressives only spurred into action when Western States begin to consider halfhearted action to prevent this? The continuing influence of Marx’s ideas seems to me to be at least part of the explanation.

We won't win Leave voters over by calling them fools for believing the 350million-a-week for the NHS pledge.

Telling people that they are fools and have been lied to is never going to win them over. That’s why complaining about the 350million-a-week for the NHS lie may make us Remainers feel good but it won’t help us stop Brexit. Rather we should use that promise against the Brexit clique to win over Leave voters. Lets make our campaign for a second referendum include the demand that that referendum include an option for staying in the EU along side a binding commitment for 350 million extra for the NHS paid for with a tax on those sectors of the economy that are going to suffer as the result of Brexit.

The Conservative Party's circumventing of electoral law is a step in a dark direction

Notwithstanding Theresa May’s hand in had walk with Trump and her hostility towards immigration she is clearly not a Trump. But Trump did come out of the blue. Packing of the supreme court has ensured that the normal election expenses rules that is essential to the functioning of normal democracies have been outlawed. This has ensured that elected representatives are so beholden to their donors that they have little legitimacy. The gutting of the voting rights act, the great achievement of the civil rights movement of the sixties, has opened the way to a myriad of voting suppression tactics. All it needs is to look at maps of many states with grotesque voting districts to see that crude gerrymandering of the kind that in a real democracy would result in prison terms to realize that American democracy was flawed well before Trump.

The election fraud revealed by channel four is not on the scale that is normal in the USA. But the threat to democracies today is not from crude military coups but a gradual process of democratic backsliding in which the path to authoritarian rule is taken in baby steps.

British government hard line on Brexit talks = failure of the Brexit negotiations.

We have been hearing for years that what’s wrong with the EU is that it is a political project. If only, they have been saying, it stuck to just being a free trade agreement. Of course, European Unity has never been simply about free trade- its main aim is to ensure that there is never again a war in Europe – an essentially political aim. In that it has succeeded – wars have occurred withing the geographical region of Europe (Bosnia, Ukraine) but only beyond the borders of the EU. Now, however, everything has changed. The Brexiters now tell us that the EU needs Britain as a trading partner and for this reason will be forced to accept a deal favorable to Britain so long as Theresa May stands firm.
The truth is the reverse. The remaining EU leaders see no reason to give Britain the economic benefits of membership if she is no longer wants to be part of the political project. They would like to keep good relations with Britain. They are aware that many voters still wish to be part of the EU and even after exit there is the hope that a future government may again seek membership. But the truth is that they aren’t that bothered. If Theresa thinks that being a bloody difficult woman is a good negotiating strategy she will discover that the EU leaders will decide they have better things to do than trying to get an agreement with a British government lacking any wish to compromise. The result will be Britain crashing out to the EU with no deal. But perhaps the extreme Brexiters with their ultra free-market dogma want just such an outcome with the possibility of a zero regulation bargain basement Britain?